My first talk

One day, out of the blue, I get a mail from one of my B'lore team members that a conference by the name of RootConf is being held for system admins. Considering the time and effort we have spent on setting up our own cloud and its monitoring, from scratch, we were expected to submit proposals. Now I'm thinking "Why will anyone want to hear me speak?? After all, there will be seasoned speakers and experienced admins attending the conference". After some thought I decided "There ain't anything wrong in submitting a proposal. Who knows, it may not even get as many votes to be featured as a talk". So, fearlessly, I typed down my proposal topic - "Infrastructure Monitoring using Chef and Nagios". Sounds deep doesn't it! Well when my mentor saw it he had no reaction. According to him, the topic din't catch his eye.. Of course it din't! For him its a day's work but for me it took weeks to achieve it! A seasoned speaker himself he gave me one word of advice "Use some glam words! And further in your talk prove it that the words are not just 'Glam'". Voila! My proposal changes to "Automated and Adaptive Infrastructure Monitoring using Chef, Nagios and Graphite".
Weeks go by and I don't get any mails from the conference organizers and I'm relieved! Crisis averted.. I won't have to talk in front of an audience. Not that I don't like to talk to people but a technical talk is something I'd never dreamed that I'd do. Anyway, I get down to work as usual, travel to the Gurgaon office for 3 weeks on a project assignment. Week one is smooth, I work with the developers, understand their CI, try and push for CI access to the third party vendor, talk to the project's cloud provider blah blah blah... then suddenly WHAM! I get a mail saying my talk got selected and that I have to speak at RootConf the coming weekend!! "WHAT!!" <panic-stricken-me> First I decide I'm not gonna tell anyone my talk got selected. No one would know!! and I'm saved. Then I realized when people <my team members> read the schedule they'll see my name in the talks section and then what!!
With all the might and thought I could muster, I created a presentation. Simple and sober. The next day my mentor shares a few links to add funky fonts to the presentation. As if that was not enough, I had to then add animation to the talk as well.. So much manual effort apart from the mental stress!!
So finally the date of my travel is set. I'm about to reach the airport from gurgaon when I get a mail from my manager stating I need to wear my company T-shirts and carry company visiting cards so that people know where we come from. Damn!! My whole plan of speaking and sneaking out got defeated! Now I have to give visiting cards! So people know me better and remember me... When we reach the venue, we sign a declaration that I allow RootConf to record my talk and put it up on their channel in youtube! "Dude!! They're gonna record it and put it up on the internet!" Scared to death I was preparing myself to face all sorts of embarrassing scenarios I could end up being a part of. My talk is one of the last few talks. The day goes by really slow (I'm happy!! :)) Then the moment comes. I see colleagues from my office sitting and waiting for me to start! "Why!! Why are they sitting here!! Speaking in front of known people is even worse!!" And then I start talking "Good Afternoon everyone, thanks for attending my talk. I am........"
To my surprise it went really well! Though not too well for my toes and fingers where my blood was nearing freezing point!
All in all it was a good first time experience. I hope to do another talk soon, as soon as I find out there are other talks for system admins.
 

 
Automated and Adaptive Infrastructure Monitoring using Chef, Nagios and Graphite from Pratima Singh